


The Long Haul

by pollyrepeat



Category: Dead Like Me
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2007-12-20
Updated: 2007-12-20
Packaged: 2018-01-25 07:55:17
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,620
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1640045
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pollyrepeat/pseuds/pollyrepeat
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Roxy has issues and a box. Rube is slightly concerned.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Long Haul

**Author's Note:**

> Eternal thanks to jonesandashes, who not only beta read but also helped write when I got stuck.
> 
> Written for Lydia

 

 

When Roxy slid into the booth across from Rube he'd already ordered breakfast for her. "That's never good sign," she said. "And I didn't want the eggs this morning."

"You always want the eggs," Rube said.

"Maybe after fifteen years of the eggs I'm gettin' sick of them," Roxy challenged, but started in on them anyway. "Where's Betty? She's usually here by now."

Rube started laying out post-its on the table. "Death on a plane," he said. "She'll be back by supper."

"So why the eggs?" Roxy asked. She even waited to speak until she'd swallowed her mouthful of breakfast. Sometimes, Rube reflected ruefully, it was the little things. Mason had caused him to re-evaluate a lot of previously taken-for-granted social niceties.

Rube pushed a post-it toward her. "Someone's going to die on a farm, and you get to escort his soul into the shiny lights."

"A country job?" Roxy asked dubiously. "I don't exactly have a car to get out there."

"Rural staff is overstretched today," Rube told her. "Take a bus. And if you're about to say, 'Why me?' the answers are a) you have a day off, and b) can you really see Mason finding his way out to the country for a reap?"

He had a point, about Mason. Roxy narrowed her eyes at him and absent-mindedly let her hand drift down to the holster Rube knew was concealed under her jacket, and had been since two days after her murder. It wasn't unusual. New reapers, especially those birthed into External Influences, tended to have trouble adjusting. The day Roxy had picked up the gun she had caught him staring at the tell-tale bulge under her shirt and angrily and defensively told him that she needed some form of protection. Rube had remembered how it felt to receive hot metal slugs in his chest and shrugged. To each his or her own, he supposed. He preferred cooking as a coping mechanism.

Roxy huffed, but accepted the post-it. "Fine," she said, getting up. "I'll see you at supper."

"Great," said Rube. "Now, where the fuck is Mason?"

It was only after Roxy left that he realized she had stolen his newspaper. He hadn't even gotten to read the obituaries yet.

***

Rube did not see Roxy at supper. He did, however, see Betty and Mason, who were both in combative moods and couldn't stop sniping at each other. It made him miss Roxy's constant edge of irritability. At least that way it would be two against two. At half past six Rube made a conscious decision to stop clock-watching and got up to use the can.

"- are NOT!" Mason was shouting indignantly when Rube made his way back from the bathroom. Five minutes alone, and the booth had somehow erupted into a war zone. Rube got really fucking tired of his job, sometimes, but he sat down and tried to sort the mess out while Betty poked Mason under the table until he was wild-eyed and twitchy.

"I wouldn't've done anything except for Betty dared me! Double dared me!" Mason exclaimed finally, and kicked back at Betty under the table. Rube turned towards her and frowned as she smiled innocently at him.

Kiffany meandered over to their booth and jerked her head toward the phone. "Rube, right? It's for you."

Rube grimaced at Betty, but got up. "We're not done," he warned.

"Sure," she agreed easily, and had the decency to wait until he was picking up the phone and saying hello before she slid out of the booth and vanished out the door.

It was Roxy. She was lost. "In a fucking corn maze," she said.

"I hear the stars make excellent navigational references," Rube suggested.

"Ha fucking ha," Roxy said. "I'm a city girl. I'm bashing through corn maze walls following the huge orange glow of the city lights."

"I'm not sure what you're calling me for, then," Rube told her, glancing back at the table. Mason was stealing his syrup; swigging it back like a particularly sticky drink. They both grimaced.

Roxy's voice over the phone was tinny, but held more than just the usual note of irritation. "I couldn't find my reap," she said tightly. "It's this stupid maze - they already took the body away in an ambulance, Rube. I screwed it up, and I need a ride to the morgue. And no, I don't know which one. You should leave now to come get me. I'm hanging up. Blazing a trail is easier with two hands free."

Rube sighed heavily, hung up the payphone and walked back to the booth. Mason had moved past the syrup and was grazing through Rube's hash browns. "Stop that," he said, but his heart wasn't in it.

Mason glanced up. He had a drop of syrup on his chin and three pieces of Rube's hash browns on his fork. "What's wrong with you?" he asked.

Rube always got inexplicable urges around Mason. Sometimes it was to ground him. Sometimes it was to descend to his level. Those times were always worrying, and he usually yelled louder to make up for it. Roxy had confided that Mason invariably made her want to shoot him. Rube could sympathize. "Nothing's wrong with me," Rube said. "Stop eating my hash browns and -" he held up a hand to forestall the inevitable comeback - "don't chew with your mouth open. It's rude. I'm leaving and you get the bill, since you helped yourself to my food."

"Fuck," said Mason, but yanked Rube's plate over to his side of the table and set in with enthusiasm. It had been a sad, sad day for External Influences when Rube had signed Mason's transfer papers. Rube gathered his hat and coat and did not give Mason's disgustingly syrupy fingers a last look.

The drive to the maze should have taken twenty-five minutes but Rube did it in seventeen. He even drove a little over the speed limit, which wasn't something Rube usually did, because damn it, roads were for going a set speed and why was that so difficult? Rube liked to think that a soul trapped in a dead body and probably freaking the hell out counted as an emergency. Shit. He hated fuckups.

Roxy was not waiting by the entrance to the corn maze that a happy neon-green sign cheerfully advertised was just five minutes down the road, but next to the highway. Her jacket was a little ripped, there was a twig in her hair, and there was a Roxy-sized hole in the corn wall behind her. She looked pissed off. "Next time you want someone to do a country job, pick someone else," she told him, shouldering her backpack. "Yes, even Mason the perpetual fuck up."

"Get in the truck," he said, and as she clambered in continued, "You had hours to find your reap. What happened?"

Roxy grunted, slamming the door closed behind her. "Missed the bus out here. Had to take a later one."

Rube considered that for a moment. Roxy was methodical and organized. She wasn't really the type to miss a bus. "Hmmm," he said. "Well, I guess we have to find a morgue."

There were a number of morgues in Seattle, and Rube was pretty familiar with each of them. The one their guy was taken to was probably either Northwest or Harborview.

"I hope it's Northwest," he said. They were driving towards both at the moment; they too far away for the direction to make a difference. Roxy was removing dead leaves from inside her shiny, black boots and tossing them out the window like a dispassionate executioner. The backpack rested on the seat beside them, and when Roxy opened it to deposit her gloves Rube caught a glimpse of the fraying corners of a small cardboard box.

Roxy caught his glance and zipped the backpack firmly closed. "Is Northwest closer?" she asked, replacing the right boot and starting on the left.

"More interesting." Northwest had espressos and a reaper-in-residence. Harborview just had dead people.

Despite hitting every road currently under construction in the city, they still made it to Northwest in pretty good time. Rube turned off his truck and shoved the keys into his jacket pocket. Roxy glared at the building's white exterior, pausing with one hand on the passenger's door.

"Do you think they'll have done the autopsy yet?" she asked, her voice steady. A handful of decades ago Rube had been part of a similar fuckup, not long after his grand and messy entrance into External Influences. He could have told her about it on the drive over, but he had a sharing policy. She'd probably deal with it better than he had, anyway.

Northwest had nothing for them. Emily the Reaper regretfully informed them that the body they were searching for was not within. It was, Rube thought, not surprising. It was shaping up to be the kind of day where the body _would_ end up at Harborview.

Harborview smelled clean and looked shiny, like proper hospitals ought to. After assessing the staff present, Rube decided he'd get further faster by being lost and distraught and pathetic instead of being someone important that needed to be listened to. It always seemed counterintuitive, but large and in charge sometimes just wasn't worth the hassle. He accosted a passing nurse and pasted an anguished look onto his face. "Please," he said. "My cousin. We heard he was brought in here." Cousin was a pretty safe bet with which to claim kinship - looking nothing alike or coming from different generations were both easily explained away. Roxy followed two paces behind as Rube worked the system, eventually placing them outside the morgue doors. Roxy, Rube saw, had not left her backpack in the truck. That damn box again. He'd probably missed something.

The nurse told them to wait here while she talked to the coroner, and disappeared behind the double doors. Rube slipped his hands into his pockets and watched Roxy lean against the opposite wall.

"What?" she demanded, after a few minutes. He shrugged and fished into the back of his brain for Things to Talk About With Roxy, disregarding the first few ideas because it was obviously not shaping up to be an okay day for her. He finally settled on her ongoing quest to make an honest living.

"It's fine," she said darkly. "Better if I had a fucking job history. Or references. Or didn't have to change my occupation every ten years or so when people start to notice that I'm not aging." Those were often a number of reapers' top complaints, right after the job description and the vast number of issues with biting it in the first place.

"I know someone who might be able to temporarily help you out with that," Rube offered.

"Temporarily?"

He shrugged. "Twenty years, tops." It was difficult to find permanence in death. Rube liked to ignore how horribly ironic that was. The someone he currently used to forge his own history was pretty new; he'd reaped the former, more experienced someone last January. Faulty elevator, of all things.

"Right," said Roxy. "Well. Okay. Thanks," she said, and then turned a strange sort of ashy colour as the morgue doors open and they were ushered in to find Cousin M. Gerbrandt.

The morgue attendant put his hand on a cold drawer handle and paused, frowning lightly. "Did you say cousins?"

"We sure did," Rube said. As long as the drawer opened and they retrieved the soul, it wouldn't much matter whether anyone believed their story.

"Okay," the attendant said dubiously. "Uh - he's not exactly a pretty sight. Tripped over a scarecrow and bashed his head on a rock."

"That's fine," Roxy snapped, clutching at her backpack strap with tense fingers. "Just open the damn drawer."

"Grief," Rube explained to the attendant, who huffed and pulled open the drawer.

M's forehead had a soft, round depression in it, sticky with blood. Rube took a step back and folded his arms, which Roxy took as her cue to take a step forward and lightly stroke a finger down the body's wrist. Her mouth was a tight, unhappy line.

"Hey, did you guys hear about that big accident downtown? Limo skidded across traffic and caused a pileup. Six people dead, at the last count." The attendant was obviously feeling chatty, and continued in this vein for a number of minutes, showing Rube the picture of the crash in the newspaper while Roxy said a stiff apology and ushered the traumatized soul towards a brightly gleaming palm tree. "So, was that your cousin?"

"No," said Roxy absently, then belatedly added, "Uh, thank God."

Rube waited until they were back in the truck before he unfolded the newspaper he'd snagged from the morgue while the attendant was closing the drawer. "I would have given you the day off," he told her.

Roxy, to her credit, didn't bother to play dumb. Her fingers drummed an impatient staccato against the dashboard. "I can still do my job. It's nothing. She's - nothing."

"This was a pretty poor example of doing your job," Rube said, a little heatedly. "And I gotta say, the person who murdered you probably isn't nothing to you. That's _personal_."

Roxy said nothing, but after a few moments of silence glanced over and smiled at him. Roxy was pretty good at faking it, but spend fifteen years with a person and you start to learn their tells. "I'm fine," she said. "Really. I was a little rattled today, but she's dead, so it's all evened out."

"Uh huh," Rube said doubtfully, but put the truck into gear and started for the diner. At a red light, he looked over at the backpack and threw caution to the wind. "What's in the box?"

Roxy looked distinctly shifty, but she shrugged. "This and that," she said. "Mementos."

"Does it now include an obituary for a murderer?" Rube pulled the truck into the diner's parking lot and turned it off. It was a bit chilly out, and without the engine on the cold began to seep into the cab. Roxy stared out the window, one hand on the backpack. "You should come over to my place sometime," Rube offered. "Do some cooking, maybe."

"I don't really cook anymore," Roxy told him. "Thanks for the ride." She opened the door and hopped out of the truck.

"Roxy," Rube called. "Next time, let me know. You get your death day off for a reason."

Roxy stopped momentarily, her back to him, and then turned. "Jennifer's dead," she said. "I guess there won't be a next time." She continued on into the diner, and Rube, after a moment, followed her in and sat down in the usual spot while Roxy got a cup of coffee from the counter.

Kiffany wandered over to his booth. Her pad and paper were poised, ready for action. "What do you want?" she asked him. He had actually planned on going home, but Mason was so rarely not here when Rube was that it seemed like he should spend some quality time one-on-one with the booth, so he ordered number six. In his experience, unhealthy association tended to sneak up on a person.

"You staying?" he asked Roxy.

She gathered up her backpack and slung it over her shoulder. It didn't look heavy, but Roxy had always been light on her feet. Rube often had to take his Roxy observations with a grain of salt. "See you at breakfast," she said. He nodded at her in way of response and watched her march out the door.

Death was long. Maybe next year she'd show him what was in the box.

 


End file.
